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Thank you so, so much to everyone who bought a T-shirt. We sold 91 shirts and raised $853.87 (!), all of which I’ve just now donated to Seed Life Skills. If you’d like to make a further tax-deductible donation, I’m sure they’d love for you to click that link and pitch in a few bucks if you can.

Enjoy your shirts and have a wonderful summer of canning and preserving!

The fruits in our area are just starting to ripen—blueberries and black raspberries, mostly—and I hope to get to a farm up near Pittsburgh in the next few days to procure some. My daughter’s younger cousin is visiting from New York; when he wanted a PB&J sandwich the other day I went down to the cellar to pick out a jar and realized to my dismay that the only preserves I have left from last year are the oddballs that aren’t particularly kid friendly (plum mostarda, amba, strawberries with lots of spicy ginger, blackberry and cracked coriander jam . . . ), so I think my first order of canning business should be stocking up on the basics. What will you be canning this summer? Anything new to you?

There’s an amazing thing going on in the little college town of Athens, Georgia, where we used to live. This fall, Seed Life Skills, a nonprofit organization working to develop a modern, highly relevant Home Ec curriculum that can be replicated in schools across the country, will launch its pilot classroom program. Headed up by Hugh Acheson and Almeta Tulloss, the organization’s mission is to empower youth to be “sustainable stewards of food and financial resources.” Kids will learn to cook healthful meals using whole foods and solid kitchen techniques; they’ll learn to grow and preserve produce; they’ll learn how to minimize consumer waste and make the most of a budget; they’ll learn to mend their own clothes; they’ll learn to compare cell phone contracts and navigate a health insurance statement—all skills that will give them a lifelong confidence in the kitchen and beyond.

I think this new (old) vision for school Home Ec classes should be fully supported by public school systems everywhere, and it seems to me that Seed Life Skills is doing the hard work of showing exactly how it can be done. I want to help them out a bit, so I’ve set up a T-shirt campaign on Teespring; if enough people order a shirt—there are several styles available—they’ll be printed and shipped, and I’ll donate the profits from the sale of the shirts (minus taxes) to Seed Life Skills.

My friend Jake Genen was kind enough to work up a super-cool design (doesn’t it look a little like those World War I and II “Waste not, want not!” and victory garden posters—without the flag-draped maidens and “unsweetened” pickled Kaisers?).

These shirts are soft and comfy, and they’d probably look great underneath a linen-and-leather apron at your next tomato-canning party, or over a long-sleeved waffle-knit for apple picking in the fall. If nothing else, treating yourself—and/or friends!—to a sweet new tee would be a fun way to celebrate the start of the summer canning season while also supporting a very worthwhile public good.

I just wanted to let you all know real quick that the new edition of Canning for a New Generation will be released on July 5 (!) and is currently available to preorder (B&N; Powell’s). Here’s the new cover, featuring another gorgeous photograph by Rinne Allen and a surprisingly thick spine (it’s a brick of a book):

There are about fifty new recipes and lots of new photographs, and the general canning instructions and some of the older recipes have been updated and clarified a bit. If you have gift-giving in your future, this would be the edition to order!

I hope late spring–early meteorological summer is treating you all well. For my part I’ve been mostly holed up working on the slow cooker book, which is due all too soon—there’s so much I want to cram into it! On the one hand it’s a great project for this time of year, because even when you have three or four slow cookers bubbling away in the kitchen at once it doesn’t heat up the house at all. On the other hand I wish I’d saved more of the lighter, vegetarian dishes for summer testing, because when it’s ninety degrees in the shade and the cicadas are deafening (we’re at peak Brood V emergence right now in northern West Virginia, or at least I hope it’s peak) and all you want for supper is a bowl of cereal and a tall glass of iced tea, big pots of hot chilis and gumbos and tagines and bourguignons, no matter how delicious, can become a bit of a burden. Next time I start work on a book I’ll think more carefully about my schedule and what daily life will be like in the midst of it. In the meantime I’m filling up the extra freezer with both family-size and single-serving portions. I just hope I can find them when I go digging for them in a few months among the bags of frozen U-pick summer fruits.